Football Portraits « Matthew Cavanah

Football Portraits

A couple of weeks ago I was tasked with covering Missouri’s football media and fan day. This included some portraits of a few players for featured articles in the Tribune’s college and high school football preview insert, First and Ten. It’d been a while since I’d done a portrait, and the room I was assigned to use at the stadium was the visiting locker room, which didn’t really have air so to speak. So not only was I nervous, I was sweaty. But then again, everyone in that room was sweaty.

A few days before Parker, the photo editor, and I went down to the Trib’s studio and worked out some setups for the portraits. There is a basic look that we’ve gone with for the First and Ten and we wanted to stick to that while still visually alluding to the stories the photos would go with.

For quarterback James Franklin the premise was pretty simple. Franklin was raised in a relatively sheltered home and ended up becoming a pretty modest, well mannered, and nice guy because of it. So the light set up was pretty simple. Two speedlights set off to the side about even with his head. The rest was letting Franklin be the guy he was and getting that All-American smile out of him. Which wasn’t hard. The conversation when I gave him directions went like this:

Me: “Let’s see that smile you give all the ladies.” Franklin: “Nah, just the one.”

The second portrait of the day involved three of Missouri’s linebackers, which the sports department had nicknamed the God Squad. The gist of the story was these three guys have strong Christian beliefs that they believe help them to succeed not only off the field, but on it as well. This quote from the story pretty much sums it up:

“The fusion between faith and football is not unique in college or pro locker rooms, but there’s a particularly strong thread tying together the 2011 Missouri defense, a collection of mild-mannered, devout Christians who would like nothing more than to rip off your head.”

The concept for this shot wasn’t too much of a stretch. I wanted to do something with god light and Parker suggested grouping them for a single portrait. We were also trying to streamline things as much as possible since we weren’t sure who I would get access to first, so we didn’t want to make the portraits radically different. The result, in my opinion, kind of combines god light with a little bit of Bohemian Rhapsody.